This final episode in completing a set of dining chairs for Sellers’ home takes care of all the little details any maker must go through to bring everything to a quality completion.

With all of the seat slats formed and planed, it’s time to shape them, refine them, and fit them to the chair.

In the process of designing and making the prototype, Paul changed his mind to make the version better. Join us to see how we can make a mistake, fix a correction and, with just a little effort, end up with a good outcome.

We take you step by step, from gluing up the seat frame to aligning and fixing the back slats into the recesses you will cut in this episode.

Often it’s the small details we put into our projects that determine how well the result looks, and that is especially so in any uniquely different project. Shaping for practical and decorative reasons is exemplified in these dining chairs.

This chair design relies very much on shaping to lighten the chair’s appearance, both physically and visually, and to give it the graceful look and proportions Paul was aiming for, yet without compromising the structural integrity of the chair in any way.

Today, wasAe cover creating superbly accurate cauls for laminating the chair backs and seats, and then show the method Paul used to create gap-free laminations without relying on thicknessing jigs or very much planing to every piece.

Watching Paul chop the mortises at such unusual angles might seem a little daunting, but don’t worry. You won’t find instruction on this anywhere else, so we focussed on clarity that will equip you for other projects with angled shoulder lines in the future.

With half the chair frame completed, we now begin shaping the back legs and creating a complex mortise and tenon joint with angled shoulders and mortise holes to engage the legs to the seat support frame.

Paul wanted a couple of unique joints in this chair. Not just for the intrigue and interest alone, but more for some built-in structural integrity.